Brooklynaire by Sarina Bowen

You’d think a billion dollars, a professional hockey team and a six-bedroom mansion on the Promenade would satisfy a guy. You’d be wrong.

For seven years Rebecca has brightened my office with her wit and her smile. She manages both my hockey team and my sanity. I don’t know when I started waking in the night, craving her. All I know is that one whiff of her perfume ruins my concentration. And her laugh makes me hard.

When Rebecca gets hurt, I step in to help. It’s what friends do. But what friends don’t do is rip off each others’ clothes for a single, wild night together.

Now she’s avoiding me. She says we’re too different, and it can never happen again. So why can’t we keep our hands off each other?

Pet’s $0.02

This is awful, but I kind of forgot about Rebecca in this series. I have not excuse, because she was a character that I loved from the prior books. I just didn’t connect it. So, being reminded of who Rebecca was to Nate was like getting reacquainted with an old friend.

Rebecca should have been the girl Nate chased from the beginning. She was perfect for him. Way more compatible than his fiancé. Good riddance to that tramp. Rebecca was way the fuck cooler and just fit Nate. She understood how his mind worked, didn't try to monopolize his time, and supported both of Nate’s teams. Too bad he didn’t handle his attraction to Rebecca as well as he did his empire. I think his treatment of Rebecca appeared incredibly unfair at times, regardless of his motivation, and was directly responsible for her beginning to question her own personal and professional worth.

Nate is the typical clueless, smartest guy in the world, geek. He’s built a fortune from his coding and has recently expanded his empire to include a hockey team. The reasons for this become evident later in the book. They’re a little shady and not what I expected from someone who presents himself as someone completely confident in his self worth. It’s ironic that he would be the cause of so much self doubt in Rebecca, but it was cool to find out all the ways that Nate worked to keep Rebecca in his life and make her life easier where he could without her knowing.

One thing that annoyed the hell out of me about this book is that Rebecca was one of the first people to join Nate’s team in it’s start up years. She kept those geeks together, fed and watered, and made their lives easy so they could concentrate on code. And while the rest of the team enjoyed dividends from company stock, she barely scraped by because she was clerical staff and wasn’t offered the same benefit package. That’s some bullshit right there, and I really wanted to junk punch Nate at that point in the book. But, he makes up for it later, so I’m going to hold off for Rebecca’s sake.